IRISH MUSIC MAGAZINE REVIEW

Carry the Day WENR001 12 Tracks, 52 Minutes www.aoifescott.com

Aoife Scott comes with a 24 carat pedigree, daughter of Frances Black, niece to Mary Black, cousin of Danny O’Reilly of the Coronas. You can hear that musical DNA on the self penned, (Co–written with Enda Reilly), opening track All Along The Wild Atlantic Way. It has a flavour of Tom Moore about it, could it be Aoife’s Carolina Rua? Aoife’s voice is reminiscent of her mother at her very best, in fact I’d say Aoife has even more control and poise. She shines on the track, We Know Where We Stand; it is wrought through with the unabashed assurance of today’s twenty–somethings.They have total confidence in their identity, delivered here over an insistent harp and guitar pulse. She has a fine grasp of Dublin’s social and political history on Eleanor Ambrose, a heroine of the 18th century. Musically this is a gorgeous acoustic album, thanks to the presence of Michelle O’Brien on fiddle, Eoghan Scott on guitar and the piano of Eamonn De Barra. The album’s sleeve notes come with three pages of thanks and each songs source is duly acknowledged. We know the Blacks have a fine tradition of singing, inherited from their grandparent’s generation in Rathlinn, here it mingles with Aoife’s own upbringing in urban Dublin. On Carry the Day, Aoife picks up the baton, in a seamless transmission of folk between the generations. The joy here is the skill and sensitivity Aoife injects into new songs, and the care in which it is all so finely stitched together. Seán Laffey